FreeBSD Developer Summit

This invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit took place at EuroBSDCon 2009, located in Cambridge, UK. Information from 200808DevSummit, was also in Cambridge. Advanced registration was required to attend this event.

This event has now taken place.

EuroBSDCon 2009

EuroBSDCon 2009 will take place between 18-20 September 2009. All devsummit attendees are encouraged to attend EuroBSDCon, as well as present their work at the conference. Note that the second day of the devsummit is the EuroBSDCon tutorial day.

The conference is located at Robinson College at the University of Cambridge; the developer summit will make use of the conference venue for some activities, including residence. Other portions of the devsummit may also take place at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, which is a short walk from the residence at Robinson.

European attendees may consider Eurostar or Stansted Airport preferred routes due to short transit time to Cambridge and lower prices. Visitors from the US or elsewhere will likely need to travel into one of London's major international airports, such as Heathrow or Gatwick. With the exception of Luton Airport, rail offers a more convenient but more expensive route to Cambridge than bus.

Rooms at Robinson College will be booked via UKUUG; registration the developer summit, for the conference, and room booking, will be available shortly via UKUUG.

NOTE: There is some discussion of a tourist outing to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford on Monday 21 September. Bus service runs to and from the Cambridge City Centre and Cambridge Rail Station to Duxford every half hour. Big buildings full of lots and lots and lots of airplanes. Details TBD.

Registration

Registration is now open; a £25 DevSummit registration fee will be charged for all attendees in order to cover lunch, beverages, and venue costs. Use the UKUUG registration URL sent to the FreeBSD developers mailing list to register for both the devsummit and main conference, as well as book rooms. Please add yourself to the attendee list below as well (and guests in the guest section). Don't mark yourself as UKUUG registration confirmed, we'll do that once your registration has been confirmed.

Events

The developer summit will span two days, with presentation material in the mornings and hacking/working groups in the afternoons. A formal schedule will be determined closer to the event. Feel free to add items to our rough agenda -- we have room for up to four sessions at once on both days, although will likely reserve "talks" for the mornings and "discussions"/"hacking" for the afternoons.

We have reserved four rooms in the William Gates Building for the developer summit, most of which will be available between 8:30am and 5:00pm on both days:

Room

Capacity

Layout

FW09

30

Seminar room: boardroom table + chairs

FW11

30

Seminar room: tables + chairs

FW22

6

Meeting room: table + chairs

FW26

70

Seminar room: chairs w/built-in desks

PLEASE NOTE: FOOD AND DRINK ARE ALLOWED ONLY IN FW26

Wireless Networking

Status and review of the wireless networking support in 8.0 (and later). Sam will talk briefly about virtual radio support and TDMA. Rui will talk about the Draft 802.11s (mesh) support. We will discuss the need for more developer involvement, especially in the area of drivers.

Kernel capability model update

This session will present updates on the University of Cambridge's on-going capability security research project based on FreeBSD, Capsicum. This scheme provides an OS sandbox model as well as capability extensions to the POSIX API, and we're plotting merging these features into FreeBSD 9.0. This will be structured as a morning talk followed by afternoon discussion.

Bugbusting Session

Spend some time with interested folk looking at various bugs, and hopefully either get some fixes committed, develop patches, or understand what further information the PR needs before it would be useful. We'll probably try to keep a room running most of the time as a sort of "drop in and lend a hand when you're not doing anything else" room, but may also have windows where we focus on PRs within specific areas (e.g. networking).

Cryptographic signing of FreeBSD data

Talk about possible signing of FreeBSD release data, packages etc. and the related key management which would be required. E.g. should we start having a FreeBSD CA with a real PKI. It it also important to discuss what it means to sign data, IE. which gurantees do we make.

Userland version numbering

Currently we only have a version number in the kernel. This means that for example freebsd-update has no good way to indicate when the userland has been patched for a security advisory or an errata. Ideas on how to handle this could include a separate userland version number or some way to have a list of installed patches e.g. similar to UPDATING.

Console, VGA, DRM -- FreeBSD's year of the desktop?

I am currently working on a replacement for Syscons. There are a couple of things I want to do differently and it seems Syscons isn't really suited for that, such as good Unicode handling, etc. I have a working prototype that works with VGA using graphics mode and text mode on x86, but it still needs a lot of love. There are some bits that we could already consider importing into SVN, such as Unicode support for the keyboard code, etc.

I think it would be nice if we could have some discussion on FreeBSD's desktop support. It would be nice if we had someone who knows a lot about DRM, especially our in-kernel code.

Completing the Subversion Migration

Over the past year, the FreeBSD Project has been migrating from CVS to Subversion as its primary revision control system. What has happened, how did it work out, and where do we go next? The goal of this session is to identify a concrete plan for completing the migration to Subversion:

NetFPGA support in FreeBSD

Due to my internship in HIIT/Ericsson, we seem to have NetFPGA driver working right now in FreeBSD. Card can be programmed from the user-space utility with a provided bitstream file and communication going via all 4 Gigabit ports seems to work as well. Several issues exist due to interesting nature of this hardware. Proposed topics:

Presentation of a NetFPGA driver for FreeBSD

Discussion on driver's infrastructure design and implementation

Explanation, how NetFPGA is (a bit) different than other hardware

Interrupt dispatching in NetFPGA

Bitstream licensing issues (bring as firmware? push to ports?)

Integral user-space NetFPGA application's place (src? ports?)

Driver still needs a lot of work, but I hope comments obtained from Devsummit people will be useful for me.

CAM-based ATA implementation.

Existing ATA(4) infrastructure was started more then 10 years ago. While it is still quite functional and stable, there are many issues and limitations within it. Now I am working on completely new ATA subsystem, based on CAM infrastructure. I will describe my past work, as well as my future plans.